Tuesday July 30, 2013
Here is a great You Tube video on the B 24 bomber plant. Henry Ford decided he could build a B 24 bomber every hour. This required construction of the largest single bulding for manufacturing he had ever
constructed. But this is how the US won the war. Auto makers shifted to war production of planes, jeeps, and trucks. As the video announcer says, Hitler could never have imagined this was possible. The plane had four 1200 horsepower engines and could fly 3,000 miles without re fueling.
We learn the costs of quality in managerial accounting.
Design
Internal Testing
Internal Failure
External Failure
The idea is to design the construction process to eliminate mistakes from happening. An internal testing program will weed out the problems. These two steps hopefully reduce internal and external failures. Clearly one does not want an external failure on a bombing mission. Notice in the video that each plane was flown and tested before being shipped out. The crew even stopped engines in flight and re started them and dropped dummy bombs to ensure the bomb function worked properly.
Ford produced half of the 18.000+ B 24s, it was the most produced plane of the war. 8600 planes with one produced every hour in 12 hour shifts would require 716 days, with 8 hour shifts, 1075 days or three years working every day of the year.
Imagine the supply chain necessary to support an assembly line such as this. The requirement of aluminum alone for the body would be staggering not to mention the gauges, guns, and landing gear required. If the supply chain stopped at any point, production would be halted. America emerged from WW II as the premier manufacturer in the world. But by 1970 this lead had been lost to Japan in areas such as cameras, stereo, and motorcycles. It was the design of multiple cylinder dual overhead camshaft engines for motorcycles that gave Japan the lead in small car design.
Learn more about the Willow Run Plant here.
Goldie Hawn made a movie on the subject of women working in WW II plants,
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